Social Centers
It is not by spasmodic effort that full provision can be made for the gratification of the common instinct for recreation under wholesome social conditions. Social centers in abundance and embracing a multitude of recreational features are therefore an essential in modern cities. They have not been easy to secure, however, except by private philanthropy. Indeed we still have to have social center conferences and carry on a publicity campaign, to demonstrate and argue in order to gain the general consent for the use of school buildings and other public property as evening social centers for neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the movement does have real vitality now and most of the larger cities have taken definite steps to make greater use of their schools and other plants, like libraries.
In describing its entrance into the field of activity for social centers, the Women’s Municipal League of Boston, through its Social Center Chairman, Mary B. Follett, says:
Because it is our endeavor to make our city a true home for the people, it is not enough that we should merely make it a house, though it be clean and healthful to live in; for even health, though essential, is not all-sufficient. We must also insure that there shall be within it recreation, enjoyment and happiness for all. In our great house—the city—a great need exists and it is to supply this that our Committee for Social Centers was formed.
In Boston there are 56,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 18 who are earning their living, working all day, craving amusement in the evening, and with no home to provide it. Our committee organized, as an experiment, this winter, a social center in the East Boston High School, by permission of the Boston School Committee, which allowed us the use of the building in the evenings. Our aim was to offer educational recreation, and at the same time to provide for the working young people an environment which should help to prepare them for their future life.
The League engaged a skilled director and his wife to organize this work. They settled in the district three months before the social center was opened, making friends of their neighbors, young and old, and when October came they were thus enabled to begin work with 14 clubs already organized. These clubs have continued with a constantly increasing membership; there were 300 young people enrolled at the beginning, and now, after six months, there are 500 members. The clubs are called the East Boston Opportunity Clubs and are self-governing. The membership consists almost entirely of young wage-earners, but one club, the Games Club, is made up of high school pupils at the request of their teachers, in order to suggest to the girls some other occupation than stenography; they are being taught kindergarten work for use in vacation schools or with their own future children.
The list of clubs includes two dramatic and two glee clubs, two orchestras, a drum corps, two athletic associations, two sewing classes, a folk dancing class, and a junior city council. The clubs for boys and girls are kept separate, but on one occasion the Folk Dancing Club of girls gave a dance, and the members invited their men friends. The clubs often provide the program for the fortnightly entertainment given at the Social Center for young and old people. The Social Center encourages thrift, for each member of a club must pay weekly dues, and in addition many of the boys of the orchestras are saving money to buy their own instruments. One young man surprised us by saying that he had saved money by attending the Social Center, as otherwise he would have spent his time in the saloons and poolrooms. The sewing clubs have held a sale, and with the proceeds will give themselves a day’s outing.
The greatest difficulty we have encountered has been the intense racial prejudice existing between the different nationalities; but the tact and fine judgment of our director have overcome this, and today all members of the Social Center recognize the broadening influence that comes from being Americans together; in fact, one young man tells us that the Social Center is the only place since leaving school where he has met the right kind of friends.
The East Boston Social Center has proved so successful in filling a genuine need that the Boston School Committee has decided, not only to take over this Center next year, but to start three others in different districts, and has engaged our director, Mr. Hawley, to organize the work. Our Committee is now occupied in formulating plans for a large social center movement throughout Boston, and is enlisting the help and coöperation of each neighborhood for its own center, because no social center can be established on a permanent basis unless the neighborhood community realizes its own responsibility in helping to make the plan a success.
There are not enough settlements and other social agencies to provide for more than a small number of our young people. There are thousands of young men who have no place to go nights. There are thousands of girls who used to stay at home in the country but who have been brought by our changed industrial conditions to the cities to work in shops and factories. Many of these will be in the streets nights unless we provide some decent recreation for them. Thus on the one hand there is this urgent need; on the other there are all those empty buildings upon which we have spent literally millions and millions of our money. Such a waste of capital seems bad business management on our part.
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston is one among the many organizations that urge the planning of future school buildings with reference to their use as social centers. Many of the old buildings are difficult if not impossible to adapt to this use. The interest of the Boston women in this forward movement toward educational recreation has strongly supported the Boston School Committee which has now in operation several evening centers for young and old in its school buildings.
The little town needs the extension of the use of its school plant quite as much as the great city as Mrs. Desha Breckenridge shows:
In the small town which I come from, Lexington, Kentucky, with about 40,000 inhabitants, we have built a public school in which we take much pride. It is in the very poorest section of the town. The school board had but $10,000 to put into the school. Some years before, the Civic League of Lexington had established a playground in this section; then a little vacation school, with cooking, sewing and carpenter work; and finally it convinced the School Board of the need of a public school there.
As the years went by and the playground was continued, we began to feel that not only a public school, but a public school of a very unusual kind was needed in that section. There was no place for social gatherings except a saloon or a grocery with saloon attachments. The young people were going uptown to the skating rinks and the moving-picture shows, and a little later we were dealing with them through the Juvenile Court. And more and more it was borne in upon us that though we might do our best through the Juvenile Court and the Reform School to repair the damage done, a cracked vase, no matter how well mended, could never be as good as a whole one; and that the sensible thing to do was to keep these children out of the Juvenile Court and the Reform School. The School Board simply had not the money to build the sort of school we wanted, nor had it the necessary conviction and faith that a poor part of the town needed so expensive a school. So when we had gotten the Board to appropriate the last remaining $10,000, we started out to add to that sum $25,000, raised by popular subscription, and went to work on the plans for a school building which would not only allow the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, but would have a kitchen, a carpenter shop, a laundry, a gymnasium, shower baths, a swimming pool and an auditorium with a stage.
We went to the “professional philanthropists,” and after we had been turned down by most of them we came back to our own people—with just enough help from a few generous outsiders to give standing at home—and raised a large part of the money by a whirlwind campaign, such as the Y. M. C. A. has tried in many places. We could not stop at $25,000; the school and grounds have now cost about $45,000, and we know so well the places we could use a few thousand more!
We began teaching school in the new building last September; it is full of children and is a joy forever. The swimming pool, the crowning glory, is not yet completed, for we had to contract for things whenever the money was in bank, and all trimmings were postponed as late as possible. The shower baths are in full effect. The laundry is being used not only to teach the school children how to wash and iron, but the mothers of the neighborhood, who bring their washing in, pay so much a wash for the use of the water and the steam drier and the beautiful ironing boards, with gas burners at the end. The big room, with the stage at the end, which serves for kindergarten in the morning and gymnasium in the afternoon, is a story and a half high, and is used for theatrical performances and dances at night. It is running full blast. We have various night clubs already started, but we could have more—and will have more when there is a little more money to pay for supervisors, or a little more time to drum up and keep in line volunteer helpers. But, even now, the school has demonstrated that the evening is the best time, not only for reaching the fathers and mothers of the school children, but the young people—girls who work in the laundries and in the stores at $3.50 a week, and who have no place to go for dancing and other recreation, and the young men from 20 to 35, working at the distillery or the tobacco warehouses.
Evening is without doubt the great time to offer recreational opportunities to working people. Most of them cannot get these except in the evening, and the meeting at the schoolhouse is a social event; it is of all others the time when teachers and settlement workers may make connection with the parents and those over the school age.[[25]]
In almost every city, women have been behind the movement for social centers. In Lynn, Massachusetts, for example, the Women’s Political Science Club persuaded the school board to install electric lights in the Breed School so that it could be used in the evenings. One of the leading topics now in the conventions of state federations of women’s clubs is the use of the schools as social centers; and this movement is spreading rapidly to country districts which need it quite as much as do urban communities.
Miss Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the President of the United States, is one of the most ardent supporters of social centers. She has added the weight of her influence privately in constructive work and publicly in propagandist work at conferences and national conventions of various kinds.
Women are also adding to the literature on the subject of social centers for publicity value. “The School House as a Local Art Gallery” by Mrs. M. F. Johnston, and “The Social Center Movement in Minnesota” by Mrs. Mary L. Starkweather, Assistant Commissioner Women’s Department, Bureau of Labor for Minnesota, are two of the nine pamphlets issued by the Extension Division of the University of Wisconsin on Social Centers.
The Social Center Association of America, recently formed, includes among its vice-presidents, Miss Anne Morgan of New York, Miss Jane Addams, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, and Miss Mary McDowell of Chicago.
Wisconsin, California, Indiana, Massachusetts and Ohio have excellent legislation with regard to the use of schools as social centers; and it was secured with the help of women in private and organized advocacy, strengthened by experiments made by them which demonstrated the advisability of municipal control over educational recreation.
In Detroit two women persuaded the school authorities to grant the use of a school for evening dances, desiring to make the school a neighborhood center. The “Buffalo Federation of Women’s Clubs indorses any plan to make social centers of the public schools along lines so successful in other cities. An appropriation is asked from the city to carry on the work.” St. Louis club women have secured the use of several school buildings as social centers. “A social center in every public school is the plan of the club women of Syracuse, New York. Plans are being made to throw open the doors of the school buildings for neighborhood meetings and entertainments on several evenings of each week. The school officials are coöperating with the various forces in favor of social centers.” Women of Chicago asked the coöperation of the Board of Education in conducting a social center in the winter of 1911–1912. It was open thirty-two evenings with 13,000 people in attendance.[[26]]